JellyfishMating_Web

We humans are so smug. We consider lowly invertebrates primitive. We think we’re smart and can outlast hard times better than animals can in the wild by using our wits and engineering skills, which I admit are impressive. We figured out how to outdo Nature and switch our sex to become what we call transgenders. We think we’re masters of cloning by using complex technical procedures. We praise ourselves for engineering prosthetic limbs or transplanting organs when we need to repair our damaged bodies.

Good grief! When we compare ourselves to jellyfish, which people consider mere flotsam, or the like, we’re lagging behind in these categories. I thought we had enough brain neurons to distinguish reality from delusion.

First, jellyfish have survived on this planet – and magnificently so – for 7 to 800 million years, a lot longer than us; we’re relative newcomers. And when I say survive, I mean flourish. While we’re struggling to maintain an environment in which we can survive, jellyfish are blooming all over, filling the oceans with big jellies, little jellies, in the arctic, in the tropics, everywhere. What resourcefulness! Climate extremes for us are scary. Jellies thrive during the damaging climate changes that threaten our existence. They can gorge themselves with food – they eat just about anything, while we’re selective prima donnas at the dinner table – but they can also starve and shrink when the going gets tough, wait for better times, and then take off and multiply again. We’re just miserable and complain.

As for medicine: yes, we make clever artificial limbs and transplant healthy organs for failing ones. Good for us. We engineer replacement parts. But then we battle with our own immune system rejecting our new organs. When we patch ourselves up with man- made devices, we never achieve the same dexterity we had originally. Jellyfish just regenerate missing parts and become whole again. Simple. Efficient.

And when we die, it’s kaput, finished, buried or cremated. But when a swimming jellyfish medusa dies, their cells can dissociate and re-associate to make a new jellyfish.

We weren’t the first to clone or edge towards immortality either. Jellyfish are way ahead of us there too. They have two life forms, while we’re stuck with ourselves. One jellyfish form is a plant-like polyp that can clone itself asexually (boring, I know, but productive) and divide into stacked discs by a process called strobilation. Each disc will detach and escape as a free-swimming medusa; each medusa is either female or male. In some other species, the whole polyp metamorphoses into a swimming male or female medusa.

Jellyfish “do it” in so many ways! They never get bored. The male and female medusa of some species (there are thousands of species) shed eggs and sperm in similar localities. The eggs get fertilized and develop into swimming larvae, which transform into polyps. In other species, bundled spermatozoa are launched as missiles that find their way into female jellyfish and fertilize their eggs, which form larva that develop and swim around in the female. When the mother jellyfish release the larvae into the sea, they form polyps that transform into medusa, and so on. The process continues alternating from polyp to medusa and back again; back and forth, for millions of years, like clockwork.

Some jellyfish have a much more enjoyable sex life, one we would call “doing the old-fashioned way” (well, not quite, but close). A male and female entangle their tentacles, sperm gets transferred from the male to the female, eggs get fertilized internally, larvae develop, and so on.

It doesn’t end there. Transgenders are new and challenging for us. To switch our sex is a long, difficult process. But some jellyfish species are hermaphrodites: two for the price of one. There are species that are both male and female at the same time. No switching is necessary. Other species of jellyfish – sequential hermaphrodites – are either male and then female, or vice-versa, but not both simultaneously. These are natural transgender jellyfish. No special treatment is necessary.

I hardly consider these versatile creatures primitive. They have more tricks up their sleeve (I know, they don’t wear shirts) than we do. And when Ricardo in my novel, Jellyfish Have Eyes, found out that some jellyfish have multiple, sophisticated eyes, which they do in reality, he appreciated how much jellyfish can teach us. His research suggested that jellyfish might have advanced memories of evolution, individual personalities, ability to communicate, and even brains. All fiction today, of course; but perhaps not tomorrow.